The phrase ‘time is money’ certainly applies in the food service industry, and it’s why so much of the technology that heads into commercial kitchens is focused on producing food quickly, safely and efficiently.
Accelerated cooking and rapid cookers have transformed catering, but choosing the right type for your business doesn’t appear to be that simple, on the face of it. After all, they sound the same, don’t they?
Accelerated and rapid cooking technology is similar, but it certainly isn’t identical, and we’d like to help you make the choice between the two.
What is accelerated cooking?
By combining convection cooking with a microwave, an accelerated cooking device can heat food safely around five times faster than a convention oven.
Putting that into context, if you take a regular frozen pizza that requires fifteen minutes’ cooking time, an accelerated oven will get the job done in around three minutes - and it’ll be just as tasty.
What is rapid cooking?
A rapid cooker is a direct descendent of accelerated cooking, but uses something called ‘impingement’ to heat food.
Impingement cooking is often found inside pizza ovens and uses superheated jets of air to cook food. It’s easy to control and guarantees great results at up to twenty times the speed of conventional ovens.
What benefits do these technologies offer?
Both rapid and accelerated cooking is designed to speed up food production and enable more covers to be turned over in a shorter period of time. That means your business can generate higher profits each day without degrading service or taking a risk with your customers’ health.
The key lies not just in the technology itself, but the ease of use. Most of these cooking devices will come with a vast range of set programs for the most commonly-cooked food items, and use icon-based interfaces for speed of service.
It’s why, if you visit your favourite coffee shop and spot a new member of staff, they’re never phased by the accelerated cooking device that heats up your panini.
Choosing between rapid and accelerated
Thankfully, choosing between these two cooking technologies is pretty straightforward. You just need to ask yourself a simple question.
Do your customers stand and wait for their food at a counter? If the answer is “yes”, you’ll want to head down the rapid cook route, whereas if it’s “no”, an accelerated cooker will do the job.
Rapid cooking turns food around incredibly quickly, therefore if its made to order and the aim of the game is to keep a queue moving swiftly, it’ll be your knight in shining armour.
If your customers sit down and eat in house, the food probably doesn’t need to arrive instantaneously, which is why accelerated cooking is a brilliant choice in that environment.
That isn’t to say an accelerated oven won’t work in a queue-driven business; it all depends on how much those vital seconds mean to your customers and the image you want to portray as a business.
The final bonus
Accelerated and rapid cooking devices offer one final, fantastic bonus for businesses; they’re incredibly easy to install.
Most simply need plugging into a wall socket, therefore you don’t need to be an expert to get up and running with them and, most importantly, they don’t usually require an extraction, either.
Welcome to the fast cooking revolution!